Trying to sell web standards to the uninformed
by Gavin Dale on 2006/10/05
There's an interesting discussion going on at vitamin at the moment; the author of the article “Why standards still matter”, Roger Johannson, comments on how few web designers and developers use web standards when building sites - i.e. they are not separating the structure (the HTML or XHTML) from the presentation (Cascading Style Sheets).
The Web Standards Project was formed in 1998 but the message of just how vital web standards are seems to have been lost. This push for standards has also not got off the ground in South Africa as mentioned in a previous post.
So why do we need these standards anyway, it's just extra work and tables do the job, don't they?
Web standards can do the following for your site:
- Your site will be more accessible to people with disabilities i.e. increase the size of your market.
- Your site will be more search engine friendly.
- Leaner code means less bandwidth.
- Easier and therefore faster for designers to update work (only a web designer 'knows the feeling' when he/she comes across a poorly coded tables based site).
- Proofing your site for browsers and allowing other devices such as cellphones being able to browse your site.
As we can see, there are several good reasons to use web standards, so why aren't we using them?
I agree with some of the comments made in response to Johannson’s article, specifically the ones about some web developers not being willing to learn and just being happy to crank out work of a substandard nature. Clients see the front-side of the website, not the mechanics, so they often don't know any better.
So while I think clients do need to be educated and told about the advantages; we need to keep on at our fellow developers. It was hard for me to come over from tables but now I love working with CSS. Quite frankly I feel like a more professional designer, delivering a more valuable product and service to the client.
